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Using standard J2EE containers for application deployment is not always suitable option. Time to time you need to run an java application (jar file) as a server less, more light weight linux process. Using standard java -cp …. MainClass is feasible but sooner or latter you will reveal that there is something important missing. Especially if you are supposed to run multiple components in this way. I becomes relly messy and hard to manage pretty soon. On linux system there is a solution which is a lot better – run the component as a linux service.
Lets make is simple and easy to understand. Linux service is essentially a “process” which is driven by init script and has defined API – set of standard commands for management of the underlying linux process. Those linux service commands looks as following(processor represents actual name as defined in init script, see latter):

service processor start
service processor status
service processor stop
service processor restart

That’s a lot simpler, easy to manage and monitor, right? You don’t need to know where particular jar file is located etc. Examples of init scripts can be usually located /etc/init.d/samples or just simply read scripts in /etc/init.d which contains various init scripts for different kinds of linux services already present on the system.
For java applications there is a bunch of projects which acts as a service wrappers. That enables you to quickly and easily turn jar file to regular linux service as a program daemon. There are wrappers even for windows OS. For some reasons I was directed to use just linux server standard tools so the reminder of this post will be about making the linux service program daemon in a common way via shell scripts.
First of all there is a necessity to create startup and shutdown script with a need to properly manage pid (process id) file accordingly. A good practice is to have a dedicated user to run a particular linux services and have them installed under /usr/local/xxx .
startup script follows:

Startup script creates pid file located /var/run/processor – user under which the installation is running needs to have appropriate privileges.
Finally the init script which needs to be placed into /etc/init.d folder:

In the init script there is a need to change to appropriate java apps installation folder JAVA_HOME if not default and SERVICE_USER to user which is supposed to run this service. Service can be started under root account or SERVICE_USER without password specification or any other user with knowledge of credentials.

If you have a production like experience with java service wrappers mentioned at the beginning of the article don’t hesitate and share it! This way it serves the purpose at given situation.